In 1989 in Chicago, Rudolfo Linares held a nurse at gun point and then disconnected the respirator from his 15-month old, terminally ill son, comatose for several months from asphyxiation brain damage after swallowing a balloon.
A few months earlier he had been thwarted from attempting to disconnect the respirator.
In 1990 Steven Jenkins, a terminally ill AIDS patient at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center was fatally shot by his friend Philip Saylor in California.
In 1990 in New York, small farmer Delbert Ward, 59, told authorities that he smothered his brother, Bill, 64, in his sleep, as a "mercy killing".
Another brother, 70, confirmed that Bill had been seriously ill, barely able to work on the farm, after a chain-saw injury to his jaw.
Bill's autopsy revealed a benign, soft-ball sized tumor in his neck.
He had kidney and prostate tumors that might have been cancerous.
In 1990 in Detroit, Bertram Harper, according to an agreement with his wife, secured a plastic bag over her head, allowing her to suffocate, after the dose of sleeping pills she took while holding hands with her husband and daughter didn't kill her.
She was in excruciating pain from advanced terminal cancer and had asked her family to help her end her life.
The prosecutor called it a "mercy killing".
In 1993 British doctor Alan Cox gave a lethal, heart-stopping drug injection to end an elderly patient with chronic pain.
